The experience of reality has become more popular in recent year. As the specific or compatible hardware made or launched, the reality design including content production is the next work to do. There are several developing kits, platforms or solutions published by companies from different fields. Generally, the reality field can be divided into three sub-fields, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and Mixed reality (MR).
Briefly,
- Virtual Reality (VR) uses the headsets to generate realistic images, sounds and other sensations that replicate a real environment or create an imaginary setting, that is, all you can see, feel or hear is virtual.
- Augmented Reality (AR) is a live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated or extracted real-world sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. In other words, all your sensations is composed of real environment and others virtual creation.
- Mixed Reality (MR) referred to as hybrid reality, is the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualizations where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time. The difference between AR and MR is the environment addition. The MR provides you the real world with virtual objects bulit in and the additional virtual environemnt in VR.
In the book, we try to introduce fundamental knowledge to the above reality fields and demostrate several non-specific hardware required developing kits. The opposed to the non-specific hardware required one is specific hardware required machine, such as HTC vive, Snoy PlayStation VR, etc. There are several discussions to the above two architectures, each has pros and cons. In this book, we will emphasize non-specific platforms with open source developing kits.
The following developing kits or solutions would be introduced in the book.
- Virtual Reality (VR) : Google VR (Cardboard, Daydreams)
- Augmented Reality (AR) : Google ARCore, Vuforia
The following is the environment introduced or demostrated in the book.
- Unity 5.6 : Google VR on the Android Platform, Vuforia